Death of Europe: Europeans are losing the place they call home, says DOUGLAS MURRAY

Death of Europe: Europeans are losing the place they call home, says DOUGLAS MURRAY

IS OUR continent on a suicide mission? Over the years of the recent migration crisis I have been travelling across Europe from the most remote southern islands of Italy to the north of Sweden, from the islands of Greece to the suburbs of France.

African migrants picked up from their sinking catamaran in the Mediterranean

I have travelled to the places where migrants continue to land and the places where they keep ending up. Everywhere I have gone I have come to the same conclusion: our continent is in the process of self-murder.

Amid the day-to-day distraction of life and politics, it is easy to forget this biggest event of our time. All pale into insignificance besides the story of the loss by Europeans of the only place we had to call home.

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Whenever this country does have a debate about immigration it is minuscule. It tends to focus on Calais. The British public sees footage of people sitting in makeshift tents or hurling missiles into the roads to slow the trucks down so they can board them and break into Britain.

Each time actors, celebrities and politicians head to Calais and visit the camp. They return to tell the British public that it must be more open-hearted and generous.

The argument they make is humane. It is an understandable reaction to human misery but it is a core part of our society's suicide mission.

Migrant crisis: Key locations before and after

Tue, April 4, 2017

In these composite images, a comparison has been made between a scene at a key location during the height of the 2015 migrant crisis last year and the view there now

Aid workers help migrants up the shore after making the crossing from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos on November 16, 2015 in Sikaminias, Greece

Take that example of Calais. Before the latest clearance of the camp there were about 6,000 people living there. None of them should have been there.

By being there they had already broken every one of the rules that our continent put in place which demands they seek asylum in the first country of arrival. Almost nobody arrives into France first.

All these people have landed in Greece or Italy and made their way north.

And yet still the celebrities and others pick at our consciences. Can we not be generous and at least let in the people who are there? It is wholly understandable - and also ill-informed madness.

Over this year's Easter weekend alone about 8,000 people were picked up between the coast of north Africa and the south of Italy.

They were described - as everyone always is - as being "rescued". In fact what happens - what has been happening for years - is that each day boats filled with migrants set out from north Africa.

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Refugees on a rubber boat flash victory sign as they reach the shore of Greece

At first - after some high-profile sinkings - they pulled people out of their boats (or escorted the boats in) when they were close to islands such as Lampedusa.

But over time the European vessels have gone ever-closer to the shores of Libya. Today the smugglers hardly put any petrol into the barely seaworthy vessels they now put out.

The boats need go only a few miles out to sea before they are collected by European naval vessels and brought into Europe. The smugglers now do the smallest part of that journey. The Europeans do the rest.

Of course it is possible when standing in a migrant camp in one of these places or speaking to the people who arrive - as I have done many times - to think that perhaps our continent can cope with this flow.

From these far-flung outposts a few thousand people arriving every single day and then being shipped or flown up on to the mainland of Europe can seem a manageable prospect. In fact it spells a continent's catastrophe.

During the heights of the migration crisis of 2015, when Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel opened up the doors of Europe to the world, the whole continent began to buckle.

But in reality that flood of millions into Europe only sped up a process that had been under way for years. Ever since the postwar period European governments had encouraged migrant workers to come in.

At first - as Chancellor Merkel herself admitted in a speech in 2010 - they expected the workers to return home. But they didn't. They stayed. As did the flow after that and the ones for decades after that.

The governments of countries such as ours failed to get anything right. All their predictions were wrong for decades. They were wrong that people would stay for only a short time. Wrong to think that they would not continue to come in large numbers.

Wrong that they might not want to bring their extended families to join them. And wrong to think that once the tap was turned on anything but very radical action could ever bring the numbers to a controllable level.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened up the doors of Europe to the world in 2015

In a country such as Britain we are used to politicians promising things on lowering immigration that we know they will never deliver.

Remember the promises to bring immigration down to tens of thousands a year? But even this is just a portion of the big-picture changes occurring across our continent into which millions of people are moving with no end in sight.

During the course of researching The Strange Death Of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, I have travelled to see the places where those migrants who arrive on our continent end up. Last year the migrant crisis was widely believed to have slowed down.

But it had not and its effects were still visible everywhere. In the outskirts of Paris I saw hundreds of young sub-Saharan men living in tents in the middle of roadways. The French police would occasionally move them a few hundred feet further along.

In remote parts of Sweden areas that used to be filled with Swedes are inhabited instead by the residents of other continents.

Still the dream of some Europeans is that the arrivals into Europe will become European. It is more likely that Europe will simply begin to look increasingly Third World.

Migrants clash with police across Europe

Wed, February 15, 2017

Migrants clash with each other in over crowded camps across Europe.

Moroccan Police look at immigrants trying to jump the six-meter-high fence in Ceuta, Spanish enclave on the north of Africa, 09 December 2016.

Part of the reason is that we keep lying to ourselves, or failing to inform ourselves, about what is happening. Even today the Left and Right in Britain and Europe still pretend that the people arriving are refugees.

Yet as I found out for myself most are not. Most of those who arrived in 2015, for instance, are economic migrants. They are escaping economic hardships we are infinitely lucky not to have been born into. But they are not fleeing for their lives.

Open borders campaigners and others deliberately smudge the differences between these groups, massively damaging their own cause but doing their part in the destruction of our civilisation.

Neither is there any workable system to send people who should not be here back to their own countries.

The system that existed on Europe's borders was never designed to cope with flows of the kind we now have. As terrorist attacks perpetrated by people who have used this system have shown - it is almost totally broken.

As is our ability to integrate people. In 2010 Chancellor Merkel, then prime minister David Cameron and many other European leaders gave big speeches admitting that the policy of "multiculturalism" had failed.

But they then proceeded to speed up immigration to an unheard of high. If immigration had failed at such low levels, how was it meant to work at a historic high?

None of this was any more thought through than the other periods since the war. At the end of my travels I developed some ideas of how to at least slow down this flow, which is the most urgent need for our continent.

I hope Theresa May and her counterparts, all now so focused on Brexit, will consider this. But my fear is that they will not. It will go into the pot of "too big to deal with". As it does for so many other people. But we should be under no illusions if we continue to avoid this issue. Our civilisation's whole future is at stake.

To order The Strange Death Of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray published by Bloomsbury £18.99 call the Express Bookshop with your card details on 01872 562310. Or send a cheque or postal order made payable to The Express Bookshop to: Europe Offer PO Box 200, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.co.uk UK delivery is free.